Resources for Educators

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We would love to help you bring the world of Allegiance into your classroom! The piece takes place in a rich but often ignored part of American history and we believe that Allegiance can serve as a profound way for your students to begin investigating that time period. We’ve built a number of resources to help your students engage with Allegiance. Take a look around and reach out if you have questions.

The Kimura family’s journey in Allegiance is set in one of the most fascinating and troubling times in recent American history. As a direct response to Pearl Harbor and the climax of nearly fifty years of anti-Japanese bias in America, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 (issued on February 19, 1942), authorized the forced removal and mass incarceration of over 120,000 Japanese Americans into American concentration camps.

That amounted to almost 90% of all Japanese Americans living in the continental U.S. Nearly two-thirds of those imprisoned were native-born U.S. citizens and about a third were children. Japanese Americans were stripped of their constitutional rights: there were no charges and no trials.

Allegiance’s story, inspired by the true-life experience of Star Trek’s George Takei, follows one Japanese American’s family, the Kimuras, during this time and the divided loyalties that haunt them for decades.

The Kimuras are forcibly relocated to Heart Mountain Camp in rural Wyoming where Sam and his sister Kei struggled to agree on a response to this unconstitutional imprisonment: to prove the loyalty of his people, Sam enlists in the army and bravely fights for the USA in Europe; Kei, still in the Heart Mountain Camp, leads a movement of resistance against the injustice. After the war, they attempt to reconcile their actions and hurtful words, but the family’s divided loyalties threaten to tear them apart forever.

GEORGE TAKEI performs with enormous HEART and HUMOR.

Available Resources:

Student Tickets

For groups of 10 or more, Allegiance has a special $35 ticket for all students and accompanying teachers ($25/ticket for NYC schools).

COMING SOON ||Our education team is hard at work on our full “Educator Resource Guide” complete with activities and resources for you and your students.

This Guide serves as an excellent companion to attending the show and is fully aligned to the New York State Social Studies Framework, the Common Core, and the New York City Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in Theater.

Workshops

We offer two types of workshops to supplement your experience at Allegiance.

Thematic Workshops – Expanding on the ideas in the Educator Resource Guide, the workshops are taught by “Inspire Change” Teaching Artists and provide pre- and post-show experiences. These workshops help contextualize the historical context of the show while allowing your students to “dive deeper” into the material and to examine its contemporary relevance.

Performance Technique Workshops – Co-taught by an “Inspire Change” Teaching Artist and an Allegiance Broadway cast member, these workshops give students a chance to explore the historical context and themes of the show through its content (choreography, music, scene study, and more).

OUR EDUCATION PARTNERS

Initially launched in 2009 with the Broadway musical Memphis, Inspire Change is an innovative arts program that partners with commercial theater productions to provide schools and communities across the tri-state area with subsidized tickets and high-impact educational experiences. Inspire Change’s programming is developed in tandem with productions, drawing on and contributing to their research and artistry, in order to create the most effective tools to educate communities, foster dialogue, and inspire change. Beyond the actual development of content, they also provide full class sponsorships to attend Allegiance. Schools and teachers who wish to apply for the sponsorship can do so here. For more information, visit inspirechangebroadway.org.

The education team of Allegiance is working closely with Densho as its community partner to develop all of its materials. Densho is an organization dedicated to preserving, educating, and sharing the story of World War II-era incarceration of Japanese Americans in order to deepen understandings of American history and inspire action for equity.For more information, see densho.org.

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